1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method for evaluating a plurality of image recognition processing units.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been an image recognition apparatus for performing image recognition such as determination of the face of a photographed person, for example. Generally when the respective functions of a plurality of different image recognition apparatuses are compared with one another, the functions have strengths and weaknesses in various conditions such as the image quality, the resolution, the size, and the direction of an image to be recognized. When the plurality of different image recognition apparatuses can be used, it is desirable that the image recognition apparatus to be used is selected depending on a recognition object and a recognition purpose.
Therefore, a method for selecting a recognition apparatus adapted to a recognition purpose has been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-279348 discusses a method for selecting from a plurality of different document recognition apparatuses the document recognition apparatus adapted to a recognition purpose depending on an analysis result of an input image. This method, in analysis of an input image, determines whether the input image is in a table format or a document format and detects the size of characters in the image.
In the above-mentioned system, however, a management apparatus is required to previously grasp the characteristics of the plurality of image recognition apparatuses. When the recognition accuracy and the characteristics of the image recognition apparatus are changed by leaning and version upgrading thereof, the recognition accuracy and the characteristics must be updated in the management apparatus. Furthermore, the characteristics of the image recognition apparatus grasped in the management apparatus are not always characteristics conforming to a recognition object actually used by a user and conditions such as a recognition environment. These points make it more difficult to select from the plurality of image recognition apparatuses an image recognition apparatus adapted to the recognition purpose.